[Kde-accessibility] my crazy thoughts

[Pupeno]

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I've been told that at-spi was a generic system for accessibility, or at 
least, I belived that.
ATK was a Gnome solution to the hard at-spi corba based api.
And ATK was good enough to be used by other applications, like Mozilla, 
OpenOffice and Java (with a kind of bridge).
The best corba implementation seems to depend on Gnome, so, using at-spi corba 
direct won't save me from depending on Gnome.
So, I thought, let's go with ATK, if it's simpler, better.
I've found that ATK uses GObjects which I am still trying to understand (I 
asked for help in #gnome and #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org, but I didn't get any 
help :| )
I think ATK is far from a generic solution, is very Gnomish, but that's ok. 
There's no documentation (or I didn't found it) about implementing ATK in 
another toolkit.
But what really surprised me is that AT-SPI is developed in Gnome by Gnome 
developers too. It is not the generic way I thought it was.
Then I thought why is everybody else using AT-SPI when it is a Gnome thing. 
Well, it seems there's no standard thing for accessibility and only a free 
one developed by Gnome and the projects that are using AT-SPI and ATK (is 
there anyone using AT-SPI without using ATK ?) are closely related to Gnome: 
Java, developed by Sun who also is in the developing of Gnome, OpenOffice, it 
seems it already uses some things from GTK, I may be wrong, but OpenOffice 
has Sun support, or sponsorship, well, it comes from StarOffice, a Sun 
product, isn't it ? and Mozilla was already using GTK Objects, wasn't it ?
All that implementations of ATK+AT-SPI seemed simple and logical, KDE doesn't. 
It's like asking any of those to use dcop.
Yes, of course, anyone can use dcop outside KDE, there's no problem, but it is 
not designed to do that and there's no documentation for that, I think (even 
in the dcop case, there are some tools to do scripting with dcop).
I think I'm facing a desition like the one of kde 2.0: dcop vs corba.
Now I'm not thinking of using at-spi directly but to implement our own 
accessibility comunication method (anyway, I plan to take a lot of things 
from at-spi). I'm awaiting Qt's answer to see how they want to work, I still 
didn't decide anything.
Yeah, call me crazy, I've said, this are my crazy thoughts.
If we do our own accessibility toolkit... will I go against the world ? if the 
world is Gnome, you could say yes, and it's kinda true, nobody else seems to 
be working on accessibility like Gnome. Will it be posible to make a bridge 
to at-spi, yes, it will, everything is posible and I think of that bridge 
while designing whatever I design. Will we be tyranic while Gnome isn't ? no, 
the only diference between Gnome and KDE is that Gnome did it first, they 
still do it their way, it's not a generic solution, mine won't be either. 
Gnome has the advantage of 'having' some third party project as Mozilla and 
OpenOffice and even Java nearer than KDE.
But if I do an implementation from scratch I'll have some very good points 
that I can't another way, like, using KDE technologies as dcop as much as 
posible. Make Qt apps work with the KDE Accessibility too if Troll Tech 
decides to cooperate. We would be using a more 'object oriented' aproach. 
Anyway, a bridge could be always built later.
As SadEagle said, this is an invasibe development as we'll have to touch a lot 
of things, so, this issue should be taken to kde-core-devel as well before 
deciding anything.
I am dreaming, but Qwidgets could be extended using something like QAccessible 
to hold all the information needed and dcop to export all that information. 
It would be like ATK+AT-SPI embed directly into KDE and Qt architecture. Just 
an idea.
I think the main problem here is that the expert here, Bill, is closely 
related to ATK+AT-SPI and GAP development, even working for Sun, right Bill ? 
and on the other hand, the one in charge of making the desition, me, is a 
Pure KDE enthusiast. And this doesn't go very well. Maybe I'm not the best 
one to decide any of this, maybe I'm not even going to do what's best for 
KDE. If someone thinks that that's right and wants to take the responsability 
of coordinating this effort, you're welcome, I will still help as much as I 
can. I would still like to go on anyway.
Thank you.
I hope I didn't hurt anyone, I may be wrong, I'm human and I'll accept my 
mistakes.
Thank you.
- -- 
Pupeno: pupeno@pupeno.com
http://www.pupeno.com
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